XDM-External Greet

Note:
This software isn't really being actively maintained anymore. It may or
may not compile and work on your system. Let me know if you wish to take
it over.

The XDM program, which allows people to log directly into X without having
to go through a terminal session first, is generally a good program. It does
have one flaw, however... The Login widget which prompts for your username
and password, is horribly ugly.

Luckily, the original designers provided an interface for replacing this Login
widget. This allows one to (Somewhat) change the look of XDM. Unfortunately,
modifications that use this hook are linked into XDM, limiting the number of
options one has in writing them. (An example of this is
xdm-photo.)

XDM-External Greet is a patch to XDM that allows it to use an external
program to prompt the user for their username and password. These external
programs can be written in any language or toolkit, provided that they can
implement a minimal interface.

Gtkgreet

Gtkgreet is a sample program that implements this minimal interface. As you
may have guessed from the name, it uses the gtk
toolkit to implement it's interface. It's a simple program that implements
the external greeter interface.

Download

Since this is a patch to XDM, to compile it, you'll need a copy of the XDM
source code. For your convenience, two versions are available from this
web site.

xdm-pam.tar.gz (114k) This version has PAM
support, for newer versions of Redhat Linux and other PAM enabled operating
systems.

xdm-nopam.tar.gz (106k) This is the
standard version, which should work with most other X environments.

User-Contributed Greeter Programs

This section of the page is dedicated to contributed greeter programs.
For details on the interface between the
greeter program and XDM-External Greet, please take a look at the
README file from the
distribution. If you write a greeter program, please send it to the
maintainer address below.

Jgreet

This is a greeter program with a new look, and some code to allow the
changing of background. It was written by jbjohns4@unity.ncsu.edu,
and I'll have to admit I've been unable to get it to compile. Nevertheless,
you can download it from here.